While We Pray For A Long Summer: Archonology (Part 2)

The common people pray for rain, healthy children and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.

They never are. - A Game Of Thrones

This is how we win.

How far do we have to go back to find a time when the global agenda wasn’t set from Europe (and thus America)? A thousand years?

Japan’s murky entry into World War 2 was European-led opportunism. Vietnam, Korea… both theatres essentially defined by American imperialism.

And yet, I come back from a week’s holiday and the game of thrones is… well, it’s like watching Halley’s Comet. That’s the precedent I’m citing.

When I said last year that we’re gonna win, what it felt like to me was a withdrawal of etheric support for the dominant agenda; the expansionist, transatlantic, radical right, financial cabal’s agenda. Whatever being that was riding them is still out there, but its ingress into our world has been thwarted in some w… oh, screw it… this is exactly what I mean, more literally than I care to admit:

Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick, a shadow on the wall…

And the trick in this case was that the world ‘must’ run on the engine of the Anglo-American financial system, backed by the US dollar and preserved at the expense of everything else.

“The truth is always either terrible…or boring.” – Sansa Stark

Now, to have the Federal Reserve, a private bank, set policy to protect the banks that own the Federal Reserve is having the inmates run the asylum. And it looks like the rest of the world has realised it no longer needs this shadow on the wall. (See: Pope Frank.)

Sansa’s comment notwithstanding, it amazes me that wizards aren’t more interested in this. Never has watching the world burn been so excitingly 3D. Don the glasses and let’s go topic by topic.

Or you can just pray for that long summer. But you’ve already been warned about that.

The gold

I mentioned the German request to repatriate its gold in an earlier post to an absolutely tumbleweeds response. That’s fine. No one seriously thought the first world war would break out until it did, either.

So let me back up. In that murky, power-vacuumed era of the mid twentieth century, as part of the Bretton Woods agreement, western powers agreed to tie their currency exchange rates to the US dollar, which was backed by a gold standard, meaning each dollar was worth a guaranteed amount of gold. Countries such as Germany and France transferred some of their gold to New York and London to be held in the Fed and the Bank of England.

Nixon abandoned the gold standard, effectively tipping many these countries into using, in place of gold, the US dollar as their reserve currency. However, much of the gold remains in New York and London.

Now Germany wants it back.

Why? Because they’re correctly suspicious that the Fed is lying about the amount of gold it is holding. (If you say you have more, you can sell more.) By some alarmist estimates, the Fed may have leveraged its actual gold supplies by up to 100 times.

Let’s get Homer Simpson simple: If I buy some gold from, say, the Fed, I don’t actually pull up in downtown Manhattan and get them to fill up a sack with a dollar sign on it. However, I should be able to in theory. Because I have purchased a ‘ticket’ for a certain amount of gold. Now, if the Fed has sold more gold than it actually has, and everyone shows up with their tickets and some of that gold is actually Germany’s… well, you see the problem.

Because it’s not fine. And the first ever audit of this private bank by the US treasury, an actual government department, to check if the gold was there was completely fraudulent. They didn’t even look at the fucking gold!

Please enjoy this video explanation of why otherwise-sound Bundesbank practices are replaced by the ludicrous flim-flamming techniques used by the Fed.

(Hint: the clue is in which organisation tells them to do it and why this might be. The people at the top there are the same as the ones at the top of central banks.)

The money

Speaking of Nixon, remember how the world continued to use the US dollar as its reserve currency despite it being tied to nothing but confidence in the US dollar?

Next up, Australia is signing a direct currency deal with China. Abandoning the US dollar is a big deal for the first world’s most successful economy, with 21 consecutive years of economic growth, especially one that has been the US’s closest ally in the South Pacific for a century. (It will also have a bigger economy than Britain in the next few years.)

Why does this matter?

As the US dollar loses its global reserve status it’s going to be more difficult to finance its debt. The Fed prints one trillion extra dollars a year and no one is buying them. This is too much supply and too little demand. The price drops. In the short term, this dramatically pushes up US inflation as all imports and the cost of fuel spike due to the dollar’s reduced buying power. Interest rates bounce through the roof in a desperate attempt to attract international buyers… never mind the impact this has on mortgages. (Mortgages again. The clue should be in the ‘mort’.)

The events in Cyprus which took center stage last month were an admission by the ECB, the Fed and the IMF that there wasn’t enough QE available to bailout the banking system if the currencies in question – the U.S. dollar and the euro- were going to survive the debt deflation and knock-on effects from the derivative collapse that is occurring.

In order to finance part of this process depositors will pay part of the bill. There is a reason why deposit insurance is not unlimited and it is for moments in history just like this. That the Western monetary authorities thought it was a good idea to threaten insured depositors to scare them into circulating their money, thereby undoing more than 80 years of trust in government guarantees, should tell you something about the gravity of the situation.

Because it’s no secret that I love Americans, the chaos worshipper in me puckishly looks forward to the coming day when this cabal dares to attempt to rob an over-armed populace not historically known for its acquiescence to the diktats of a lofty elite. Cyprus is a holiday resort filled with retirees and olive farmers. Texas isn’t. I look forward even more to watching the Rockefeller Republican currently occupying the White House contort in his attempt to explain this robbery by his masters of his constituents. Remember the Irish journalist? It’s not going to go that well. It’s not even going to go as well as this classic smack down:

“We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it’s usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.”

Because we don’t need a Fed. I would argue that we have never needed a Fed and its existence represents another Euro/Anglo-banking elite, archonological hijack of literally the entire world.

There is no real support for central banking. It is a relic of a central planning bygone age when justifications could be made about a tiny handful of men running the world on behalf of everyone else.

But the internet has allowed people to question this meme – and as there is no good answer, the questions have persisted and the skepticism has grown – along with central banking’s incompetence in solving a Great Recession for which they were evidently and obviously responsible. Eventually, I figure it will burst the confines of the internet and become a mainstream problem.

It is probably inevitable. And now a further instance of the gradual deflation of this dominant social theme has emerged: The most famous of them all Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, is questioning not only the functioning of the Fed but its reason for existence. [More.]

What is the Fed’s response to the evaporation of confidence and interest in the US dollar?

[T]he orchestrated move against gold and silver is to protect the exchange value of the US dollar. The Federal Reserve is creating one trillion new dollars per year, but the world is moving away from the use of the dollar for international payments and, thus, as a reserve currency.

The result is an increase in supply and a decrease in demand. That means a falling price. The orchestration against bullion cannot ultimately succeed. It is designed to gain time for the Federal Reserve to be able to continue financing the federal budget deficit by printing money and also to keep interest rates low and debt prices high in order to support the banks’ balance sheets.

The manipulation of the bullion market is illegal, but as government is doing it the law will not be enforced. It is an act of desperation. If bullion were not a threat, the government would not be attacking it.

The fact that the Federal Reserve is short selling bullion means that there is something desperate going on, and I assume it’s related to the US dollar. If the dollar drops sharply in exchange value the Fed can’t control the interest rate and the bond price and so all of the bubbles would blow up.

So that is what the situation is. They are desperate. They are having to drive down the obvious alternative to the dollar, which is gold, in order to affect the psychology of people throughout the world. [More.]

This is the only way it can end. With a political system entirely bought and paid for, the only way out is through the near-total failure of the private central bank sitting at the epicentre of this fiasco.

In coming months, though, the mild-mannered academic from Hamburg may prove a far greater threat to the future of the European project than many more strident Euro-sceptics.

The 50-year-old’s breakaway political party is the first to challenge the previously unassailable orthodoxy that Germany must stay in the eurozone. And his newly-formed movement, the Alternative For Germany, is hoping in general elections this September to tap into the 25 per cent of voters who say they could envisage Germany without the euro.

His party is a direct threat to the fragile coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has largely underwritten the eurozone’s future by shouldering the bulk of bail-out costs for southern Europe. But after successive bail-outs of the likes of Greece and Cyprus – and little in the way of gratitude from the recipients, who have branded the Germans as “Nazis” for insisting that their generosity is accompanied by economic reform – the patience of many Germans has run out. The eurozone is now promoting strife, not unity, says Mr Lucke – and so it is time to quit.

A minority party may not sound like much of a challenge to the orthodoxy but kiwis out there will know that this is precisely how MMP works. (You thought it was boring when I was talking about central banks? Now I’m talking about democratic models.) Inevitably, the largest minority party acts as ‘king maker’ by entering into a coalition with either of the two larger parties… extracting strong concessions as a condition of entry.

The concession in this case will be, at a minimum, a referendum on Germany’s future in the Eurozone. Because the permanent fix for the Eurozone’s crisis requires either southern Europe to shoot out the bottom or Germany to pop out the top. Only then can you provide a rational fiscal policy for all members.

And in terms of popping out the top, he may just be pushing on an open door. Remember how Germany wants its gold back? Why would they want their gold back?

In the increasingly likely scenario of a run on physical bullion, those who don’t get their gold back will be recompensed the way every other financial institution is recompensed when a private bank can’t pay its debts… with taxpayer money. So it’s not a question of the value of Bundesbank holdings that’s at risk. Why would they specifically want the physical gold back?

Because if you are going to launch a currency you back it up with gold reserves.

That’s it. That’s why they want it back and even if they don’t use it, it is the financial version of a nuclear deterrent. It is the ultimate leverage. Germany flips a switch and the rest of Europe is a basket case. (The Bundesbank’s terse climbdown that they ‘believe their gold is safe in New York and London’ is an indication that the wrong people got wind of the plan.)

What happens if they do?

Germany continues to export to largely price-insensitive markets like China. It already exports more to China than it does to France, for fuck’s sake.

A gold standard Deutsche Mark, having much higher value than the Euro, shrinks German banks’ exposure to the sovereign debt holdings of the remaining Eurozone countries.

It buys more euro-debt and gets to play Europe the way China plays the US without any Greek newspapers depicting its leaders as Nazis. (Sidebar: pot calling the kettle what??)

No more bail outs. Any money going from Germany to Greece and Italy is to buy luxury islands.

Checkmate, Brussels. So ends the ludicrous fiction of a one world government. The financial masters of the universe no longer lock step. Their gods have abandoned them.

“The gods have no mercy. That’s why they’re gods.” -Cersei Lannister

Syria

There’s a larger post in this series coming on this particular topic but I want to bring up just one piece of recent news:

While on his way from Durban in South Africa, where the BRICS… announced they were forming a new development bank to challenge the IMF and World Bank, Russia’s Vladimir Putin gave the go ahead for unscheduled war games in the Black Sea. By themselves the games mean little, but in a global context they mean a lot.

According to the Kremlin, the war games involved about 7,000 Russian servicemen; Russian Special Forces, Russian Marines, and airborne rapid deployment troops. All of Russia’s different services were involved and used the exercises to test their interoperability. Over thirty Russian warships based out of the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol in the Crimean Peninsula and the Russian port of Novorossiysk in Krasnodar Krai will be participating. The objective of the games are to show that Russia could mobilize for any event at a moments notice.

Is it mere coincidence that Russia is flexing its muscles after NATO revealed it was developing contingency plans for a Libya-style intervention in Syria on March 20? Two days later, Israel and Turkey ended their diplomatic row through a timely agreement that was supposedly brokered by US President Barack Obama in twenty minutes while he was visiting Israel. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that with Obama’s help a deal was made with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan to end the diplomatic rift over the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara in 2010.

Days later, this event was followed by the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) — a phoney opposition organization constructed by the US, UK, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — being ceremoniously given Syria’s seat at the Arab League.

In a pleasing Cypriot twist, Russia’s only Mediterranean base is in Syrian territory. It did, of course, ask Cyprus for use of its ports as a condition of any financial assistance.

Again, we are seeing the evaporation of acquiescence to western imperialism. Whilst this won’t come to war, what it shows is that the MI6/CIA/’al qaeda’/Naziocon destabilisation of Syria will have to remain a spook and spook-funded-terrorist take down for the time being, despite what Obama says about chemical weapons. The latest chemical weapon assertion being entirely false:

North Korea – the pivot

Speaking of wars that probably won’t happen!

Look… North Korea has only ever had one card to play. Its ‘drop the bomb’ card. This gets really clunky when you try to use it to beg for money from foreign powers but you can only work with the tools you have.

North Korea is China’s Israel…. it is a once-useful puppet that has, to use Kissinger’s phrase about Israel, become “a geopolitical nightmare”. The pressure from China to modernise would have been extreme from the second that angry little fat kid squeezed himself into his dead dad’s poo-brown military pyjamas. (Worst. Uniform. Ever.)

It also very much does not want US troops permanently on its doorstep, which is the end result of any hypothetical military action initiated by North Korea.

So the plan is

North Korea pretends to go to war.

North Korea ‘extracts concessions from its cowardly enemies and also China’ in the form of money and investment.

North Korea gets to save (fat) face.

China will be using the opportunity of international investment to extract strict policy change promises from North Korea that can be summed up as “you can have some money if you stop being a dick and pretend to be a real country”. However, this may (ie should) necessitate the complete removal of the ronery dynasty.

If the fat kid refuses to go then he may push the button. If that happens then, for the first time in a few decades, the west is entirely justified in leaving nothing but a stain where once the world’s most anachronistic despot used to watch his 1998 CRT television.

But, either way… this is the Pacific pivot.

This is the point that was always going to arrive where the game of thrones leaves Europe and the North Atlantic to fade away with its criminal bankers and leftover monarchs and arrives in the world’s biggest ocean. The outcome define’s China’s place at the big boy’s table and the US’s place in the Pacific.

What I said about Halley’s Comet…. you’re watching it.

A note about collapse

As so many of the Wanderers have forsaken the undersea realm for a conclave in the palace of the war god, let me bring one final thing up. Historically, there are two things we know about collapse and both of them should give us some comfort.

Firstly, when the money dries up, like it did with the British and Roman empires… the collapse is a lot faster than expected.

Secondly, even in the worst cases of imperial collapse, such as the Roman evacuation of Britain or the early days of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, things aren’t actually all that bad. Archaeological evidence shows that the people more or less muddled on with their lives.

So it sure looks like it’s coming soon but when it gets here it won’t be that bad.

In no way are we facing an intermediate period that looks like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (however much I would like to eat tinned peaches and shower with Viggo Mortensen). These are just orcs. Whatever happens, don’t forget we’ve already won.

Until then, returning to the opening quote about prayers, like Buffy said to the vanishing girl, have a nice summer.

More good reading:

27 Comments

Are these events really without precedent, or is our ignorance just masking the truth?

Few clear answers in this one. As for the korean and syrian theatres, knowledge of the manufacture of these nations, could easily lead to thoughts of controlled opposition and corporate sponsored chaos. Speaking of achronology, is there a message that persists more than “impending doom”?

This article made me think the various fractionation would lead slowly to consolidation, like the housing bubble.. Can’t wait for the next installment, more geopolitics and usury please.

I couldn’t think of two more different people than you and John Michael Greer (thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com), and yet you both arrive to the same conclusion, the innevitability of Colapse, and the need for the average person to muddle along.

Gordon, I think Glenn Beck, libertarians and a lot of conservative republicans would agree with much of your post (Obama as a Rockefeller republican would give them trouble). With regard to guns, many have been stocking up on guns and ammo since the November elections and Newtown. Homeland Security has as well: to the tune of 1.6 billion rounds of ammo. It might get interesting.

So,
1. Baroness Thatcher lay dying in the London Rtiz as I was writing a post about the end of this archonic regime.
2. Her daughter was flying back from the Alps, and, depending on WHERE in the Alps may bring in a Nazi sync
3. Rasputin’s death in the Hellboy video closed the gate. Rasputin being a supporter of the Czar regime and Baroness Thatcher… who died… was instrumental in dismantling the USSR.
4. The new pope is Argentinian and the Falklands are a flash point again.

AS BEST I CAN TELL (hat tip Cat Vincent)

5. She died within MINUTES/ONE HOUR of the 109th anniversary of Crowley receiving the Book Of The Law, which declares the old order over and that we are each of us stars. (I am scouring the news for an exact time of date.)

I noticed you rarely mention Switzerland in your analysis in spite of the fact that it is at the intersection of the various aspects you depict above : at the center of Europe, lots of banks, money, gold… ; it’s even considered as the “bad boy” by the other european nations, which says a lot …

What’s your take on it, if I may ? Is there an esoteric reason for its past success, if we go beyond the standard “they are rich because they cheat” ?

Wow, good question. Unfortunately the answer is going to be boring for probably everyone else.

Basically, in my line of work, when trading across markets, “Germany” is actually DACH because we allocate campaigns by language. So it’s my own mental shorthand at fault. It falls into two different “language markets”.

But, other than Brussels, I also didn’t mention Benelux or a dozen other places, either. Switzerland certainly has the banks, but the bankers breaking the world are elsewhere.

You will find no peak oil projections here because they’re quite wrong. America’s successful steps toward energy independence have changed the game quite a bit. This is at the heart of its changing Eurasian policy.

But I guess it’s similar in posing the question: what are you willing to go through to come out the other side into a better world? I’ve lost three jobs and all my savings TWICE since this financial collapse started. And I’m still looking forward to fiddling while Rome burns because of the opportunity to build something better afterward.

@Ron The gun reference was more to make the point that the American government really is scared of its populace, as all governments should be, and sometimes this gets forgotten. Certainly didn’t mean to imply armed insurrection.

I am with you on everything until Germany and a Gold-Standard currency. Honestly I don’t truly see how any affluent western nation could at this stage of the game. There is simply too much money now. It would more or less back Germany into the same corner America is in right now, of having to admit it has over leveraged the shit out of its finite pile of gold. We really need to get over it in the west I think, this whole gold standard crap, the rest of world could go on believing their currency had a discreet value because they used the US dollar as their trade currency and the US Fed based the American dollars value on Gold still. Except anyone that got licensed in the west to deal in Commodities, Securities or Currency realizes at some point that there just isn’t enough gold in the world.

The illusion was convenient, it let us (the West) be really indignant with Socialist economies which just unabashedly currency-fix, like they were cheating at the game. You can’t slut it up with the BRIC and still cling to that archaic justification of hereditary wealth, they will destroy you with it. Which is more or less what we are seeing now. I think Germany’s accounting of its gold is a de facto proclamation that it intends to get in on the game though, which could very well mean a revival of a national currency (its current debt/GDP/unemployment rates would already assure it of a greater trade value then the Euro). On the heels of buying up all the debt in Europe if Germany was to establish its own currency they would basically instantaneously become the international trade currency for the whole of the European Bloc. Quite a few economists are already complaining about the Japanese artificially adjusting their currency values to stabilize their national economy. Mark Carney, who is currently moving from the Bank of Canada to the Bank of England is very clever and subtle but I wonder if he will make bigger waves once he is in England and his penchance for currency manipulation falls under a wider international spotlight.

The most useful data for those of us trapped in the US media bubble is in the comment sections of the foreign press websites. Ignore any posts from Americans (since we don’t know what’s going on anyway) and you can start to really take the temperature of the globe’s human rectum. In terms of the impending collapse of the EU for example, the southern members really do see Deutschland’s actions as a kind of economic warfare (WW$$$). However a lot of the EU seems to think that Germany needs them as much as they need her. While this may have been the case at one point, I don’t see Italy or Greece buying a lot of high-end machine parts, technical lab equipment, or medical research. The German people, on the other hand, are of the “live and fuck you” mindset — from their point of view the German citizens are being made to pay for the laziness and corruption of others. Accordingly, the people in Southern Europe are suffering under the governments they themselves have chosen and are getting what they deserve (the irony is bitterly delicious here). Disclaimer: my family is German, my mom is still a German citizen — my relatives resemble these remarks.

Also, for those Americans who might not realize this, WWII was about five minutes ago in Europe. It’s not nearly history yet.

From a US standpoint I see the most critical factor in getting through the coming years to be the massive centralization and industrialization of basic necessities such as food and water. Sure, this happens in Europe, but the individual countries are so much smaller and all have preserved some kind of local agriculture (EU notwithstanding). Here in the US our food and waste system are hyper-fragile, relying on complex pinpoint logistics and a massive amount of carbon input. We have massive populations living in areas that do not have the environmental capacity to support them (and climate change will make this much worse). Not to mention that these industrial production methods are creating disease and illness in the population.

My goal right now is to help make my family’s situation as robust (or even antifragile) as possible while avoiding the cliches of TEOTWAWKI and the zombie apocalypse.

I’d push back on your view of a German gold standard. They don’t over-leverage. That’s the whole point. And they’d back it with gold because as the nerd in that video says… gold has stable buying power. Gold only looks like it has increased in value because the dollar has decreased so much. And remember the last time Germany had hyper-inflation? It led to You Know Who. The cultural resistance to inflation is immense. Has to be seen to be believed.

As for the Canadian running the Bank of England? You think the BRITISH will stand in the way of his currency manipulation?!? Why do you suppose he got the job?

@Ivy I like silver, since you asked. If only because it dropped lower than gold from a higher relative high. And if there is a ‘physical bullion crisis’ it could lead to a run on gold… and if markets don’t want to buy the US dollar they may stump for silver. More of an upswing either way.

In the US, however, I also like farm land. For many of the reasons you have just listed.

You’re also right in how much southern europe overestimates how much Germany needs them in terms of trade partners, especially in a scenario where their governments can’t raise enough money for the large-scale investment schemes that would require hi-tech exports. And over the last decade, Germany has made some good coin quietly sellings cars to the emerging Chinese middle class.

But in terms of their emotional ‘view’ of the euro-project… at least in so far as the Germans I work with are concerned… it’s fascinatingly schizophrenic. Yes, there are the concerns over the rest of Europe’s productivity (justified)… but a country that has so many words for ‘fate’ and ‘national destiny’ also believes in committing to something until the bitter end if it’s the greater good. And I, for one, personally DO believe the EU project is for the greater good. It’s just that the euro is a malfunctioning currency. One can exist without the other, as any non-euro member of the EU will tell you. (I actually think a ‘euro north’ and a ‘euro south’ would be worth investigating.)

And yes, the time thing is spot on. Was watching a video yesterday where someone said “Americans think in decades, Europeans think in centuries and the Chinese think in millennia.”

Your family antifragility project is entirely sound. But I would say that. It’s also my current policy.

Silver is awesome, but we’re obviously not the only ones who think so. I’ve been calling around and silver coin is hard to find.

Of course, I’m confusing the EU with the Euro-zone when they really aren’t the same. Though without the perceived benefits of unified currency, why would the southern countries risk the brain drain that would come from open immigration and work privileges? Countries are stronger when they are net exporters (as Germany well knows) and not losing their best to the North.

I don’t necessarily agree that the EU is for the greater good. It can be managed that way or the other way. As with most things, the idea itself is neutral.

It’s interesting that you find arable land an interesting US investment, being as you are relatively anti home ownership. The reason I can see to own a home right now is to have usable land to go with it (here at least, it can be very usable indeed).

Of course one of the major decisions in planing for robustness / anti-fragility is to decide whether you will plan around for mobility or not. Mobility allows for a certain personal arbitrage (going where the work is, going where the money is) but with associated financial and social costs. Non-mobility allows maximization of resources locally and the building of a local infrastructure but exposes to more economic risks in terms of earning potential. This depends in large part on career choice as well (I don’t know why high school guidance councilors never bring this up — where / how do you want to live? is the first question I’d ask).

I believe everyone of us should have an anti fragility project in the works, A nice slice of autonomy in an undisclosed location, funded hopefully by our local endeavors, close enough to things we love and would love to cultivate.

As much as we could enjoy “the collapse”/ rome burning”, there is not much novel in these current events that appear to me like cracks in the social order. As every good insurance man knows, always know where the exits are. (or was that flight attendants?)

Korea and Syria just appear to me like nations created for the sole purpose of having someone to direct the collective attention of the debtors.. preserving an order, out of corporate sponsored chaos.

Still, Germany returning to the old standard operating procedures… has a pretty ominous ring to it.

“When I said last year that we’re gonna win, what it felt like to me was a withdrawal of etheric support for the dominant agenda; the expansionist, transatlantic, radical right, financial cabal’s agenda.” I’m more inclined to think that etheric support has been switched to different players, so I find your optimism puzzling. Do you by any chance read Agora Financial or Laissez Faire newsletters? They’ve been saying for some time now what you said in this post. That’s not a complaint. I enjoy reading Jeff Tucker. (Yes, i enjoy reading your blog too even when I disagree with you.) As for the American government attempting to rob an armed populace, have you noticed the increasing efforts by Democrats to tighten gun controls? Control is already tighter than most people think it is. Have you also noticed how many idiots (general populace) support these measures because they’ve drunk the Kool-aid that these laws will make criminals’ guns disappear — and that the government is just taking care of us? As for currency alternatives, what do you think of Bitcoin? It’s stunning how the BTC-USD exchange rate has gone through the roof just in the past month.

@Gordon a free and armed populace is always scary to those wanting to control by force. A free people should also be scared of centralized authority. I hope to never see the need for an armed insurrection.

@OwlRose the American government is already robbing an armed population by devaluing the dollar. It’s a hidden tax.

“I am with you on everything until Germany and a Gold-Standard currency. Honestly I don’t truly see how any affluent western nation could at this stage of the game. There is simply too much money now.”

Well, according to some experts, we may be facing a massive deflation provoked by a considerable decrease of the amount of money in circulation (remember M.V = P.Q ?). Just imagine a quadrillion dollars derivatives going worthless e.g. (1), and its impact on the equation of exchange…; there wouldn’t be too much money after *that* for a new standard to be put in place.

Not saying we are all about to be taken up in the mothership. It strikes me that the physical realm will always have at least one presiding archon. It’s just this one’s time is up. Think of it like and end-of-season villain. IT’S withdrawing its etheric support, not the support of the entire etheric, if that makes it clearer. But, as ever, there’s always next season.

I’m not anti-homeownership, I’m anti 300% leverage for a single illiquid asset. I’m anti mortgage. You don’t have to live on the farmland, just hold it for a while.

Also… no, I don’t actually read any investment newsletters that don’t directly involve my work. And I’d be surprised to learn how much I’d enjoy reading something with the words “laissez faire” in the title. Not exactly my politics.

The trouble with gold and silver is that you must take physical ownership of the gold in this current economy. I’m on my mobile phone and don’t have much time this am, but some banks have been caught charging handling fees and storage fees for bullion, without ever actually taking the trouble to buy the gold or silver. Another case of wolves and foxes ruling the henhouse.
The trouble with living at the end of one Aeon and the beginning of the next, is that no one is really clear what the new Aeon’s rules are going to be. Invest in silver or seeds? Gold or goldenrod? Dollars or Deutchmarks? Reals or renminbi?

@Gordon, I realize you describe yourself as socialist, but you might have more in common with Jeffrey Tucker than you realize — at least where sound currency and tangible assets are concerned. Do I really need to remind a chaos magician not to get hung up on labels? At any rate, your comments about the American government being afraid of its citizens are very perceptive, more perceptive than a lot of Americans are in fact.

@Ivy, do you have a garden? It’s surprising what can grow even on an apartment patio or windowsills.

It’s possible I suppose, there is also a lot of hidden political mileage to be had in the Gold Standard. With Carney moving to the BoE I think it pretty much goes without saying that the British are going to get in on the currency-fixing game because why else would you put Carney in that seat. That would put the British in a pretty good position for a European-Currency standard, the more instability in Europe the better the Pound looks. To clarify, I doubt very much any of the British bankers will complain, rather I wonder if Carney can be as cavalier about his currency manipulation when he is helms the considerably more influential British banking establishment. Canada simply does not have the impact on international finance that England does (we have a population of 12), so no one really cares when Carney adjusts our currency values by artificially adjusting interest/inflation rates.

I feel in my squishy heart of hearts that if the Great White Shark had done in Britain what he has done in Canada over the last few years Germany and France would have flipped their shit. The Inflation/GDP/Interest basis of currency value is really the most sensible at this stage of the game and it democratises money significantly better than finite trading standards. Germany might not even require its own currency since it now owns all of southern Europe’s debt since they can play games with all that debt now. They can do things that required a ‘Bank of England’ before, like adjust the trading value of the Euro through interest rate manipulation. I figure dissolution of the Union is not a done deal just yet, Germany has a bit of room left to salvage the Euro, if the rest of Europe will let them. If they don’t, they will establish their own currency for sure.Ryan Valentine´s last blog post ..Chasing Pidgins

This is the kind of magic more people need to know about. The BIG things of magic: the misdeeds of the archons and the resistance, the storm that sank the Armada, the work in the Battle of Britain, the freemasonry that designed DC, the workings at Skull and Bones and Bohemian Grove, the odor of Satan in the Church, the Roman superposition of Roman deities on Celtic holy sites (a practice continued by the Catholics), the battles in the Hawaiian islands, the support of dictatorships in Haiti and Africa through juju and sorcery…Lance Foster´s last blog post ..Don’t Give Up

The trouble with America’s “successful steps toward energy independence”? It comes in two forms: natural gas (esp. through fracking, which royally screws up the aquifers) which can supply electricity and heat, and tar sands (which also destroys the environment) and the oil of which is of low grade and there is a -net energy deficit- when you pencil out what energy comes from it vs what energy it takes to mine and process it. You spend more energy than you get.

Nuclear and natural gas can help generate electricity and heat. One can even argue that there can also be massive retrofit of American transportation technology (such as electric cars) (although not many of us can afford a $40K car these days…and the amount of energy and effort to complete a nationwide retrofit is not in the cards). One thing one cannot get around is that there are some things oil can do that nuclear and gas cannot do: oil is the substance of plastics and other synthetic materials, as well as pesticides, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, etc., the building blocks of much of the chemistry the American Dream operates on.